Eleanor Of Aquitaine (23 page)

When as kjng Heniy rulde this land,
    The second of that name,
    Besides the queene, he deaily lovde
    A fane and comely dame.

Most peerlesse was her beautye founde,
Her favour, and her face;
A sweeter creature in this worlde
Could never prince embrace.

Her crisped locoes like threads of golde
Appeal d to each mans sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,
Did cast a heavenlye light.

The blood within her crystal cheek,
Did such a colour drive,
As though the lillye and the rose
For mastership did strive.

Yea Rosamond, fair Rosamonde,
Her name was called so,
To whom our queene, dame Ellinor,
Was known a deadlye foe.

The king therefore, for her defence
Against the furious queene,
At Woodcocks budded such a bower,
The like was never seene.

Most curiously that bower was built
Of stone and timber strong,
An hundred and fifty doors
Did to this bower belong.

And they so cunninglye contriv'd,
With turnings round about,
That none but with a clue of thread
Could enter in or out.

The Ballad of Fair Rosamond

*

THE ESTRANGEMENT BETWEEN HENRY AND ELEANOR, disclosed to the more observing in the feudal world by the treaty of Montmirail, had been growing for some time. It is Giraldus Cambrensis who relates that it was in the late sixties and the early seventies that Henry's relations with Rosamond Clifford were an open scandal in the English court. "He [Henry]," says Giraldus, "who had long been a secret adulterer, now flaunted his paramour for all to see, not that Rose of the World
(Rosa-mundi)
as some vain and foolish people called her, but that Rose of Unchastity
(Rosa-immundi)
."

There was something very special about the famous case of Rosamond Clifford that deeply roused the Plantagenet queen. Her rancor could not have been due to the mere fact of the king's infidelities. To make the best of their lords' philanderings was the common lot of highborn ladies when nobles married fiefs and errant spouses took their pleasures as they could on
chevauchée
. It was not a paltry amour that affronted the queen. She knew as well as the rest of the world that vassals retired their comely wives and daughters from the king's lust,
³
and that no hostage of high or low degree was secure in Henry's strongholds. Eleanor had averted her eyes from many other episodes. What so stirred the queen must have been that public flaunting of the favorite, of which Giraldus speaks, in those palaces where she herself had reigned, by virtue of her lineage, as undisputed mistress, and by virtue of her own exploits, as the most brilliant queen of Christendom. It is significant of the special flagrancy of the Clifford episode that the scandal whereby the queen was affronted aroused for her not only the support of her sons, but the indignation of both Henry's relatives and her own.

The idyll of Henry's love for Rosamond, which has given rise to such abundant legend, is circumscribed by but little time and space.
⁴
It is associated with a small locality — Oxford, the palace of Woodstock, and the nunnery of Godstow, all threaded together by the pastoral windings of the Glyme and the noisy churning of the upper Thames. The girl whose beauty drew upon her the eyes of her king was the daughter of Walter de Clifford of Bredelais on the Welsh border, a Norman knight who paid feudal service to Henry in his war in Wales.
⁵
It was possibly in the course of his Welsh campaign in 1165, while Eleanor was still serving as the king's vicegerent in distant Angers, that Henry encountered that "masterpiece of nature"
⁶
at Bredelais or at Godstow, where legend affirms that she was educated. The period of the affair was between 1166 and 1177, so its earlier phase ran concurrently with Becket's primacy and then somewhat beyond his martyrdom.
⁷
Rosamond died in 1177, and during the decade Henry was at various times abroad.

Everyone knows the legend of the tower and maze at Woodstock, "wunderliche ywrought of Daedalus werke," which Henry is said to have built in the park of his forestal palace to sequester Rosamond from jealous eyes; of Rosamond's well gushing from its beechen slope into the Glyme, where wild conies, peering from the thorn and holly, came to drink; of the needlework chest, carved with birds and other creatures, which the king gave Rosamond for her embroidery; of the fatal silken clue that fell from it, whereby the queen at last threaded her way to the sylvan retreat by the river. Everyone has heard it said and sung that the queen here offered the beauteous leman of the king her choice between the dagger and the poison bowl as an escape from the royal fury. Some tell of the sons the "flower of the world" bore to the king.

Rosamond died young in pious retirement at Godstow. Hoveden, writing in the century, relates that the pitiful nuns, condoning her fault, placed her tomb in the midst of their choir, and that Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, making his pastoral rounds in Oxfordshire as late as 1191 or 1192, was shocked to find it there, draped with a costly pall and bright with candles. The nuns, brought to account, explained that for the sake of Rosamond, a royal alms had greatly enriched their poor little house. The bishop was scandalized. He banished her dust from the sanctuary lest virtuous women, beholding her burial place decked like a shrine, should be led to fear not at all the consequence of sin.
⁸
She was removed then to the nuns' chapter house beside the Thames, which here makes a loud noise as it runs toward Oxford. But soon a miraculous token rebuked Hugh's episcopal severity. In the garth of Godstow an old nut tree was presently found bearing hollow shells instead of proper fruit, and the nuns remembered that Rosamond herself foretold that the end of her penance in purgatory and her entry into paradise would be marked by this very sign.

Later we hear that her dust was distinguished from that of the Godstow nuns by that jingling couplet in which the poet, as Giraldus had done in his chronicle, plays upon the Latin of her name.

Hic facet in tumba Rosa mundi, non Rosamunda:
     Non redolet, sedolet, quae redolere solet.

Whatever germ of truth may lurk in certain of these tales, the legend that Rosamond was the mother of Henry's two eldest illegitimate sons, Geoffrey the Chancellor and William, Earl of Salisbury, is rendered impossible by Giraldus' fixing of the period of Henry's relations with her, and affirming her youth at the time of them. These sons were old enough to have been Rosamond's grown brothers, and must therefore have been the fruit of some liaison of the king's early manhood. The story of the queen's proffer of the dagger and the poison bowl must likewise be discarded, because at the time of Rosamond's death in the late seventies, Eleanor was certainly in a very safe place where she could not strike at the king's favorite.

The legend of the little park at Woodstock with the tower and the maze "of Daedalus werke" persisted long in popular imagination, but if that retreat comprised, as the story says, the spring still known as "Rosamond's well," it was somewhat too near the palace to be overlooked by the mistress of Woodstock and too much in the way of the queen's country
chevauchées
beside the Glyme to remain long a secret bower. It may be that Henry, intensely preoccupied with his campaign in Wales and knowing Eleanor then at a safe distance in Angers, had grown careless and admitted the lovely Clifford to Woodstock itself.

In 1165, during the king's Welsh campaign, Eleanor had been his vicegerent on the marches of Anjou. In 1166 Henry joined her for the Easter court in Angers, and then in October of that year she crossed to Britain while Henry remained abroad. In England the queen made peregrinations in Oxfordshire and then retired to the castle of Oxford, where on the day after Christmas she gave birth to her youngest son, whom she named John in honor of the saint of his natal day. It may be that in the course of her autumn journeyings, and perhaps alerted by informers, she closed in on Woodstock without harbingers and found her rival lodged in that most intimate, domestic, and beloved of all the Plantagenet residences in England.

*

Whatever the final incidents may have been, they led Eleanor to remember that, before ever she had been the Queen of France or of England, she had been the Countess of Poitou, and that, as scion of those Poitevins, Guillaume le Grand and Guillaume le Troubadour, she held in her own right a province beyond the Loire as sovereign as any king's, and a resolution to grasp into her own hands its wealth and freedom possessed her. She made up her mind to cut off with the bright sword of the river her portion of the world from Henry's, set up her second son as heir to her patrimony, and leave the king to make whatever division he could among his other heirs of what was left of his empire, a division in which her son Richard would hold enough to offset any rival among the other sons. Her vengeance for the Clifford affair was aimed not at the flaxen beauty of the king's folly, but at Henry himself, his mounting ambition, his nearly realized dreams of empire. And her decisions presently, as says Devizes, "troubled" the Angevin house "like that of Oedipus."

Such feudal dereliction in a woman was so extraordinary as to escape the apprehension of the average man, as witness the mystification of the assistants at Montmirail. The queen, no longer an apprentice at statesmanship, surveyed a situation favorable to the course on which she had determined. In the first place, she was Louis Capet's vassal for Poitou and Aquitaine, and could, in spite of the circumstances that had estranged her from the King of the Franks, depend upon his faithful support of any measures calculated to harry the King of the English. The Bretons were in the habit of breaking into scattered uprisings whenever Henry's attention was turned to other provinces, and to these malcontents certain dispossessed castellans of Maine and Anjou were drawn by an irresistible attraction. Moreover, the Becket affair, consolidating many of Henry's foes and bringing him into collision with the church, weakened his prestige with Rome. But more than all, her own vassals, who had for thirty years borne with recurrent mutiny the "oppression" of her two royal consorts, were eager to see the time ripening when they could throw off altogether the shackles of alien kings fastened upon them secretly at the death of their last native duke; and they were certain to welcome the revival of the splendid ducal court.

Henry was not, of course, among the merely curious observers of the queen's movements. He promptly took what measures he could to protect his interests. While Eleanor spent the season of Advent in 1166 in Oxford, preoccupied with the birth of her youngest son, Henry on the other side of the Channel convened his Christmas court in her newly rebuilt palace of Poitiers; and there he presented to the queen's vassals his eldest son, not as being heir of Poitou, to be sure, but as destined to be the future overlord of that heir.

Throughout 1167, though beset in his own provinces, Henry wrestled with the queen's rebellious homagers in Auvergne, Poitou, and the Limousin. The Lusignans, the most powerful of the duchess' liege men, that feudal house that "yielded to no yoke, or ever kept faith with any overlord," led the rebellion. But the furious barons of the south could not submerge their rivalries in a common cause, and Henry scotched them one by one. He scaled the impossible steeps of the fortress of Lusignan that loomed over the road from Poitiers to Niort, razed its redoubtable walls, burned its ruins, and ravaged its fruitful lands.
¹²
The scions of the most famous houses were reduced to brigandage, and in their distress those bitter vassals of the queen found refuge in the unbounded hospitality of Louis Capet.

Early in 1168, after the Christmas court in Argentan, victorious Henry escorted the Countess of Poitou through her own domain as Louis had done before him, and left her at last in the deep south with a household purely Poitevin. She was not, however, abandoned to the seditious counsel of her own
mesnie
. Perhaps with her consent, in view of the violence and anarchy in the provinces; perhaps also by way of reminding the Poitevins to whom they owed allegiance, she was placed under the protective custody of Henry's distinguished vassal, Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, with a body of soldiers. But the king had no sooner returned to his own affairs north of the Loire than a signal event bore witness to the insecurity of the Angevin peace he had enforced.

As the countess journeyed northward toward Poitiers about Easter time under escort of Earl Patrick and his bodyguard, the dispossessed Lusignans burst from ambush upon her convoy and tried to capture her, as it was said, for ransom to recoup their recent losses. Eleanor, who knew how to manage herself in the saddle, and who had moreover fended off brigands in these regions several times before, rode to the safety of a nearby castle; but Earl Patrick, who protected her flight in person, was murdered by a fell blow from behind and his
mesnie
was captured, wounded, or put to flight.

The surviving hero of the incident was Earl Patrick's nephew, the recently knighted Guillaume le Maréchal. The youth found in this combat the golden opportunity to flesh his sword, find his patron, and open his way to fame and fortune. The episode offered the first steppingstone to Guillaume in his brilliant rise in the courts of the Plantagenets from simple knight to the highest dignities in the gift of kings. Eleanor, "valiant and courteous lady that she was," says the account, "bestowed upon him horses, arms, gold, and rich garments, and more than all opened her palace gates and fostered his ambition." In her behalf he had fought "like a wild boar against dogs."